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Literary studies

Why did early modern men and women travel? Why was travel polemical in this period? How was it a collective experience, shaped by cultural expectations, social standing, education or the traveller’s career aspitrations?

It is a commonplace that the advent of printing in Europe revolutionised communication and the transmission of ideas. This Northern Renaissance Seminar event seeks to complicate and move beyond the “printing revolution” narrative to consider the messy and multiplicitous facets of communication, correspondence and transmission in the early modern world. How was it conceptualised, theorised or deployed as metaphor? What were its geographical, temporal or linguistic limits? How might it be transgressive or disruptive, and who might try to circumscribe it? We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines, including history, literature, art history, archaeology, languages, and drama.

Early modern literature is rife with bloody passions and extreme emotions, from the violent excesses of tragic drama to the passionate outpourings of sermons. Recent scholarship has considered individually the shifting interpretative grounds of passion, blood and emotion in this period. This one day symposium, hosted by the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth, seeks to bring these areas of study into fruitful dialogue to consider the intersections of blood and passion in extreme emotions in early modern literature and culture. Through exploring the representation and effect of these intersections, the symposium will interrogate the construction and deconstruction of the inner and outer, physical and spiritual early modern subject.